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  1. Lose it!
Setting up this app is extremely easy – plug in your age, height, weight 
and target weight. Then, search for the food you’re eating throughout
the day in the large library of food. All of those calories will be calculated 
in a graph on the home screen. It displays a graph for the day and also for
 the week, so you can easily see how well you’re doing. People take group 
workout classes because having other people around puts the pressure on to 
do well. Lose It! uses this idea as well. Connect with Facebook and use your
 friends to stay motivated. When you sign up for an account with your email,
 the app will send blog posts about nutrition. It’s a nice way to stay knowledgeable 
about the food you’re eating.
  1. MyFitnessPal
With a focus on both food and exercise, MyFitnessPal is a complete weight loss
 tool. Enter in all your information at the top and put in whether or not you want
 to lose, gain or maintain your weight. The app not only counts the calories 
you intake but also considers how much physical activity you do. Search for 
different kinds of exercise from running to yoga to cleaning. Like Lose It! 
there is a social media function and you can actually message your friends 
within the app so you can encourage each other directly.
There is also a graph that not only breaks down how many calories you’ve had
 but also what types of food. That way, you can see exactly how much of your 
diet is carbs or protein. You can sync with your computer so no matter where 
you are, you can record your daily intake.
  1. Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker
Keeping track of everything you’re eating can be exhausting, which is why this app has a voice activation feature. Just say “one bagel with cream cheese” and it will record the calories from that meal. It also comes with a barcode scanner so you can get the exact nutrition facts from packaged foods. This allows for really accurate break downs. You can set goals like “run an extra half mile,” or “don’t eat any fast food,” and check them off throughout the day. Calorie Counter delivers letter grades at the end of the day on not only how well you did nutritionally, but also how closely you stuck to your goals.
  1. Fooducate
Fooducate is for the nutrition nerds. Search or scan packaged foods and 
get a complete nutritional break down. Not just how many calories you’re
 consuming, but also amounts of fat, carbs or protein. If you don’t have
 a barcode for something, you can type it into the database and the app will 
deliver the pros and cons about it so you know just what you’re getting. If you
 can’t find the food you want, you can submit it to the company and it will be 
analysed. One of the most useful features of the app is that it can look for certain 
allergies in food like nuts or gluten and alert you to them.
  1. My Diet Diary
My Diet Diary looks beautiful. The menus are easy to navigate and the background of the main menu is a soothing sail boat at sunset. Scroll down and how many grams of carbs and fat you have left for the day and which vitamins you’re missing. Food intake and exercise are very important to a healthy lifestyle but many forget that water plays a large part. My Diet Diary keeps track of how many glasses of water you’re consuming. The app also acts as a nagging friend and will remind you when you should eat or exercise. It leaves no room for excuses so you will feel pressured to stick to your daily goals.
Additional info: Heavy.com
How your smartphone can make you healthier
Is technology helping to make us healthier, or just the opposite?
Looking around, you’d probably guess the latter. Worldwide, obesity rates have more than doubled since 1980, with almost two billion adults classified as overweight in 2014. As technology develops and automates more and more tasks, people are living increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Not getting enough exercise increases your risk of health problems, including cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, and even certain types of cancers.
With that in mind, the steady march of technological progress seems like it might do more harm than good. Why go outside and exercise when you’re surrounded by entertainment at home? The United States now boasts an average of 5.7 Internet-connected devices per household.
We’re constantly surrounded by screens, and not just at home. Around the world, mobile devices outnumber people. Could the ubiquity of smartphones be a contributing factor in our worsening health?
Smartphones almost certainly impact our social health as people prefer to stare at their screens instead of making conversation or even eye contact. But has our addiction to playing Angry Birds, instead of going outside and seeing real ones, contributed to a decline in our physical health as well?
In fact, the opposite may be true. The increasing ubiquity of smartphones has also given rise to a booming smartphone healthcare industry.
Thanks to new smartphone apps and other developing new technologies, anyone can now monitor their heart rate, track diet and exercise routine, and keep an eye on their blood sugar levels without complicated or expensive equipment. Going forward, experts predict thatsmartphone health apps will “reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients.”
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SOURCE: PUNCH.